Craft beer now makes up a quarter of the beer market in the U.S., which means brewers are eager for ways to stand out. For some, that means buying hops locally -- even in Indiana. It's encouraging more and more upstart Hoosier growers to invest long-term in the trendy crop. Steve Howe is one of them. His Crown Point backyard doubles as Howe Farms. Past a pen of piglets and fluffy Scottish Highland cows, Howe is growing a tiny forest of hops. Their vines stretch almost 20 feet into the air, wound around strings that hang in rows from cables. Those are stretched between wooden posts dug into the tilled earth. "When you walk through, you can see it's starting to wall up," Howe said, pointing out how the healthiest hop plants will grow into a thick curtain. "You have walls of green, basically." Howe put up these trellises, but he's not a farmer by trade -- he's a social studies teacher. And he's one of a number of Hoosiers trying to transition to hops farming as a full-time job. These
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